On Ethics: Does senior faculty deserve best digs?

RANDY COHEN

Published 6:30 am, Thursday, December 31, 2009

Q: I am a faculty member at a university undergoing major campus renovations, including new office spaces. Departments were asked to determine their own ways of assigning rooms, but the task is complicated by factors like seniority and rank — does someone with tenure deserve a better room? Some faculty members have greater teaching demands and might need larger rooms to meet with students. What is the most ethical way to allocate offices: Seniority? Rank? Lottery?

A: It is admirable that you and your colleagues seek a fair approach. If only it were easy to devise one. A professor I consulted, a longtime friend, sighed, if one can sigh by e-mail: “I think it'll be a matter of which method is the least unfair rather than the most fair.”

It is tempting to favor job title or seniority as criteria for distributing these goodies: Rank has its privileges, and reasonably so in a meritocracy.

Alas, to use either assumes a more egalitarian world than ours and risks further rewarding the beneficiaries of past discrimination: older, whiter, manlier men who began their careers in an era when many colleges were reluctant to hire or promote women and African-Americans, for example.

Hence, I prefer a lottery. Or did, until my academic friend told me that “no senior person would allow a first-year instructor to land by luck in the best office.” Even if your chairman could insist on a lottery, any system that puts colleagues at daggers drawn is imperfect. (As we have seen, on campus and off, the lower the stakes, the bloodier the conflict.)

To diminish potential resentment and augment a feeling of fair play, your chairman should encourage all your colleagues to weigh in on the best approach to office allocation. A sense that all views are heard and that the process is reasonable is as important as any particular outcome. One characteristic of an equitable social order is that the community sees itself as fair.

Update:The department winnowed its options to years of service and a lottery, and put them to a vote. The faculty was tied when a late-arriving senior member turned up to cast the deciding vote for the lottery. A sense of fairness prevails for now, maybe because many people are moving from windowless offices to a building in which each office has a window.

Q: I am an avid public radio listener and donate regularly to my local station. It recently became known that its chief executive is the highest-paid in public broadcasting, earning nearly $500,000 a year. Many of my friends see this as a misuse of donated money and now refuse to support the station. I feel that if you listen, you must pay your share. Who's right?

—B.L.,Philadelphia

A: I'm with you. Regular listeners must be guided by a stricture familiar to any 5-year-old: Do your share (any bright and kindly 5-year-old). You enjoy the station enough to listen to its programs; you must help cover its costs.

Even if your friends have a legitimate gripe about the CEO's salary, to refuse to donate would be like skipping out on a restaurant bill because you think the chef who prepared your delicious dinner was overpaid. If your pals are so appalled by this salary that they can't in good conscience have anything to do with the station, so be it.

Then they must decline to listen as well as to donate and should send the station a stern letter saying so. But if they continue to listen, they may not make perfection in station operations a precondition for writing a check.

All institutions have flaws. Whether this salary actually is a flaw is something about which honorable people may differ. What it is not is a justification for being a free rider.